He’s a lot of things: a commentator, political PR guy, Twitter scrapper, dad, recovering alcoholic, Mongolian ambassador, soon-to-be editor of the Post, and, when Toby Manhire interviewed him back in 2019, philosophy student. Here’s what one of the most fascinating – and polarising – characters in NZ politics had to say for himself.
L ife is a like a game of Trivial Pursuit, said Matthew Hooton. You seek to collect the wedges. “So there’s family. Work. Political commentary. There should be exercise but there hasn’t been since February. And there’s academia. And there is also the alcohol and drug recovery. So those are the pieces of pie.”
For most of us, it’s the commentary piece that defines him. The eloquent, sometimes angry, dependably provocative commentator from the free-market right of politics. The bête noire of very many on the other side. The founder and owner of Exceltium, a political PR firm, a role which his detractors contend should disqualify him from his position as a high-profile voice on the national broadcaster, RNZ. The perpetual antagonist, always in a scrap somewhere – whether it’s the left versus right radio set-piece against Stephen Mills, or a weird legal battle with the eccentric publisher of the NBR, or a heated late-night exchange with an anonymous Twitter user.
But for Hooton, the primary focus in recent months has been the academic part of the pie. Silver-haired and 46, Hooton has embarked on a Masters in philosophy at Kings College London. Not that the trifling detail of being thousands of miles away in an ivory tower has done much to deny New Zealanders his many opinions on politics. He’s stood down from his RNZ slot while in London, but kept up the columns for the New Zealand Herald and Metro – not to mention those belligerent #nzpol tweets deep into the London night. And hardly had he stepped off the plane in Auckland for his end-of-year break before he was back on Newstalk ZB and the familiar seat at RNZ. All of this week he’s been hosting New Zealand’s biggest talkback programme on ZB.
On the eve of his departure for the UK Hooton swung by the Spinoff office in Morningside. The interview ran for almost two hours. “If I had a client who talked to someone with a tape recorder for that long, I’d fire the client for refusing to follow instructions,” he said. For someone about to leave his business and dive into a postgraduate degree at one of the world’s most prestigious universities he seemed very relaxed. Apart, perhaps, from a handful of moments where he bristled like a cat at some affront or other, and issued the Hooton death stare.
Like when I asked about whether his role as a political commentator – arguably New Zealand’s best known commentator, and in one of the most prominent political slots of the week, with Kathryn Ryan on RNZ Nine to Noon every Monday – was essentially an extension of his political public relations firm, Exceltium.
“No,” he glared. “It’s harmful to it.”
He held the stare for a couple of seconds, then blinked. “It’s harmful to it in the sense that some people just don’t want to be associated with anyone in the media, some potential clients. What else? It takes time. And it can piss off the very policymakers that you may then want to talk to.”
It wasn’t entirely without its advantages, however. “The benefits of it are that my name is known. So that if I call a Beehive staffer or a business person they know who they’re talking to.”
But, he said, “the two roles are completely distinct because of the nature of the work. I mean, people in the media, and particularly people on Twitter, have a perception that it would matter what’s being said on the Nine to Noon programme in a commercial sense. And it really doesn’t.”
‘They get grin fucked and nothing happens’
Hooton’s career, if it you can call it a career at all, is less Trivial Pursuit disc and more carousel – a merry-go-round of academia, political advisor, travel and PR. “Except for when I was in my 20s I’ve never had a job, not in the way most people would think about it,” he said.
He was mid-law-degree in 1990 when he was offered a summer speech-writing job in the office of then education minister Lockwood Smith. Another big beast of the National Party, his local MP Doug Graham, advised him to forgo the political gig and take a summer course towards his degree instead. “He said, ‘You’ll never go back to university if you do. You’ll get addicted to politics.’ So in a way I’ve proven him wrong.”
He largely stuck around until 1996, when parliament was thrown into a post-election paralysis Winston Peters and NZ First, holding the balance of power, negotiated the first MMP government.
“We had to go to work to be paid. But we weren’t allowed to do any work constitutionally, right?”
Hooton says “right?” a lot, as a kind a rhetorical punctuation mark.
“So it was great for the first couple of weeks you got to work about 10, office morning tea, out for a boozy lunch, back to the office at four t…
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